Disable binary text extraction to optimize Lucene indexing

This article explains how to disable indexing of the contents of binary files such as PDFs and Office documents which reduces index growth going forward. If you perform a reindex on the disabled indexes, it reduces the overall index size.

Environment

AEM 6.x

Steps

To disable indexing of PDF and Microsoft Office documents:

Go to http://host:port/crx/packmgr/index.jsp and log in as admin.

Upload and install the attached package.

Restart AEM (this is done to free up any stuck indexing threads, if there are any).

If your overall objective is to reduce the amount of disk space consumed by indexes, then follow these extra steps: